Your job, should you choose to accept it, is to comment on this thread explaining the most awesome thing you've done this month. You may be as blatantly proud of yourself as you feel. You may unabashedly consider yourself the coolest freaking person ever because of that awesome thing you're dying to tell everyone about. This is the place to do just that.

Remember, however, that this isn't any kind of progress thread. Nor is it any kind of proposal thread. This thread is solely for people to talk about the awesome things they have done. Not "will do". Not "are working on". Have already done. This is to cultivate an environment of object level productivity rather than meta-productivity methods.

So, what's the coolest thing you've done this month?

(Previous bragging thread)

India vs. Pakistan: the nuclear option is dangerously close, and nobody seems to want to prevent it

http://qz.com/541502/a-nuclear-war-between-india-and-pakistan-is-a-very-real-possibility/

"Earth is one of the first habitable planets to form - and we're probably too early to the party to get a chance to meet future alien civilisations."

http://www.sciencealert.com/earth-was-one-of-the-first-habitable-planets-in-the-universe-and-most-are-yet-to-be-born-study-finds

This is the public group rationality diary for October 6-18, 2015. It's a place to record and chat about it if you have done, or are actively doing, things like:

• Established a useful new habit

• Obtained new evidence that made you change your mind about some belief

• Decided to behave in a different way in some set of situations

• Optimized some part of a common routine or cached behavior

• Consciously changed your emotions or affect with respect to something

• Consciously pursued new valuable information about something that could make a big difference in your life

• Learned something new about your beliefs, behavior, or life that surprised you

• Tried doing any of the above and failed

Or anything else interesting which you want to share, so that other people can think about it, and perhaps be inspired to take action themselves. Try to include enough details so that everyone can use each other's experiences to learn about what tends to work out, and what doesn't tend to work out.

Your job, should you choose to accept it, is to comment on this thread explaining the most awesome thing you've done this month. You may be as blatantly proud of yourself as you feel. You may unabashedly consider yourself the coolest freaking person ever because of that awesome thing you're dying to tell everyone about. This is the place to do just that.

Remember, however, that this isn't any kind of progress thread. Nor is it any kind of proposal thread. This thread is solely for people to talk about the awesome things they have done. Not "will do". Not "are working on". Have already done. This is to cultivate an environment of object level productivity rather than meta-productivity methods.

So, what's the coolest thing you've done this month?

(Previous bragging thread)

"I looked at what I think of as the food chain that led to the financial crisis, which was that you had individual consumers buying houses they couldn't afford, sold to them by realtors and property people who were competing to sell more properties at a higher price and so on. [...] I thought, hang on a second, classic economy theory tells you that a competitive marketplace is superior because competition provides a diversity of products which is good for the consumer, and it also, therefore diversifies risk. And yet, in this instance, competition has led every single one of these companies to copy each other, which had concentrated the risk. And I thought, Wow, that's interesting. That's specifically what's not supposed to happen."

More here.

This Chart Shows The Worst Diseases That Don't Get Enough Research Money

We have already covered this topic several times on LW, but what prompted me to link this was this remark:

Of course, where research dollars flow isn't —and shouldn't be— dictated simply in terms of which diseases lay claim to the most years, but also by, perhaps most importantly, where researchers see the most potential for a breakthrough.

[Edit: a former, dumber version of me had asked, "I wonder what criterion the author would prefer," before the correct syntax of the sentence was pointed out to me.]

Opinions?

The disease, that is, maybe not the worm itself. Anyway, Team Human scores its second point against Team Disease:

http://www.sciencealert.com/guys-we-re-really-close-to-eradicating-the-second-disease-ever-from-the-planet